Anthony Ha

Anthony Ha is a senior writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media and advertising. Previously, he worked as a tech writer at Adweek, a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in Brooklyn.

Latest from Anthony Ha

Segment helps businesses manage all their data from services like Google Analytics, Mixpanel and Salesforce — and send that data to a variety of destinations, whether it’s an attribution product or a data warehouse.
The company announced yesterday that it’s expanding its offerings by integrating with BigQuery, Google’s data warehousing service. This might seem like… Read More

BuzzFeed has a new vice president leading its data science team.
Gilad Lotan has a long résumé in the field, having most recently served as chief data scientist at New York-based startup studio Betaworks, and before that working in data-related roles at SocialFlow, Microsoft and Endemol.
Publisher Dao Nguyen told me that this is a new role at BuzzFeed — the closest equivalent being… Read More

Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn looks like it’s ready to go.
The company’s Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith just announced that the deal has been cleared by the European Commission — the last regulator that needed to sign off on the deal.
“As a result, we’ve now obtained all of the regulatory approvals needed to complete the acquisition… Read More

Disrupt London Day 1 was a massive success.
DeepMind’s Mustafa Suleyman taught us about the future of AI. Autonomy founder Dr. Michael Lynch mocked HP’s $5 billion lawsuit against him. And Boston Dynamics’ Marc Raibert showed off his four-legged robotic friend, SpotMini.
But the heart of Disrupt has always been the Startup Battlefield, and this year’s London crew was… Read More

Wandered.space is a service for those moments when you want to explore the area around you, but don’t know where to go.
It was created this weekend at TechCrunch’s Disrupt London hackathon by a team of three coworkers from Seattle-based Azuqua. One of them, Skyler Hartle, told me that they were inspired by their visit to London and decided to create something that would help… Read More

Annapurna Pictures, the production company behind films including Zero Dark Thirty and Her, is launching a new division focused on video game development and publishing.
Annapurna was founded by Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and has developed a reputation for writing relatively large checks for arty, director-driven films — though it’s also faced… Read More

A few months ago, iHeartRadio announced that it would be adding paid subscriptions for on-demand music. Today it’s releasing more details about its plans — and launching beta versions of those paid offerings.
iHeartMedia, the company behind iHeartRadio, has its roots in traditional radio (it owns 858 stations), and until now, the app was largely a way for you to listen to radio on… Read More

Rick Schwartz has produced some great, successful movies, including The Departed, Black Swan and Gangs of New York. But with Jerrick Media Holdings (founded with former Wall Street executive Jeremy Frommer), he’s shifting his focus to the online world.
Schwartz explained the move by saying he’d “noticed that it was harder and harder to get people to go into theaters… Read More

Civis Analytics, a company founded by the chief analytics officer of Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, has raised $22 million in Series A funding.
Founder and CEO Dan Wagner told me that after the election, he discovered that many organizations — whether they were in politics, government or business — were dealing with problems similar to the ones he faced during… Read More

Knotch promises marketers a better way to collect user feedback about the effectiveness of their sponsored content. Now it’s announcing that it has received a design patent for its approach.
Basically, when a sponsored article uses Knotch, a survey question pops up at the end, which is supposed to help advertisers assess your state of mind after reading the article. The big difference… Read More

AT&T today officially unveiled its DirecTV Now live TV streaming service at an event held in New York City. The service, which is launching on November 30, was first announced earlier this year.
Many of the details about the new service were reported already, including a starting price point of $35 per month, and a lineup of more than 100 channels, with the option to add on premium… Read More

Dick’s Sporting Goods is expanding its digital tools with the acquisition of GameChanger Media, the company behind the mobile scorekeeping app of the same name.
A sporting goods company (with 675 locations across the United States) might not seem like an obvious buyer of tech companies, but it’s been building up its suite of digital products for youth sports — which it… Read More

If you’re a little skeptical about trying out another news aggregator, Gong CEO Itzik Ben-Bassat knows what you’re probably thinking — after all, he heard the same thing when he was pitching investors.
“They all kind of looked at me and said, ‘Not again,'” he recalled.
But it seems like Ben-Bassat (who was previously an executive at Blizzard Entertainment and… Read More

Social publishing platform Wattpad is making its biggest move into Hollywood yet thanks to a new deal with Universal Cable Productions.
UCP is a TV production company owned by NBCUniversal — it’s produced shows including USA’s Mr. Robot, SyFy’s The Magicians and Bravo’s Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce. As a result of the deal, the company plans to develop… Read More

BuzzFeed just announced that it has raised another $200 million from NBCUniversal.
That might sound a little familiar, since the company raised a round of the same size last year. Plus, Recode reported last month that NBCUniversal was doubling down, and the news seemed to be confirmed by a Delaware filing.
The funding release points to past collaborations between the two companies, like… Read More

Tech and politics need a translator — at least according to Jamie Corley and Christyn Lansing, founders of The Bridge.
Corley and Lansing have worked in both worlds — each of them, for example, has served as press secretary for a US senator (Bob Corker and Rob Portman, respectively), while Lansing was also communications director at Politico.
They told me they got the idea for… Read More

It might be time for movie lovers to add another streaming service to their monthly subscriptions — FilmStruck, a new service created by Turner Classic Movies.
Services like Amazon and Netflix are building up libraries of originals (starting with TV, but also including films), and they’re striking deals to get high-profile new releases. But if you’re a particular kind of… Read More

Silicon Valley has been lampooned as the place where entrepreneurs like to declare they’re “making the world a better place” when they’re actually just trying to make money. But now a new, nonpartisan initiative called Debug Politics is encouraging the tech industry to live up to the catchphrase — by helping to fix the political system.
Jesse Pickard, CEO of… Read More

If you’re about to eat out and looking to choose a restaurant, you’ve got plenty of food and local recommendation apps to choose from first. But Tom Limongello, CEO of Truffle, argued that none of those apps really capture the experience of word-of-mouth recommendations — of getting that perfect tip from a friend.
With Truffle, on the other hand, you can send friends a… Read More

Comedy site Funny or Die has sold a minority stake to AMC Networks.
The deal is intended to strengthen the ties between Funny or Die and AMC’s IFC channel, according to The Hollywood Reporter, with IFC President Jennifer Caserta joining the site’s board of directors. (Funny or Die already produced the IFC series The Spoils of Babylon and the upcoming series Brockmire.)
Funny or… Read More